Old techniques used to drive a linear shuttle of this type, which moves in a straight line, back and forth, over a flat-bed paper handler, utilized either powerful servo drives, which required substantial power, or utilized a scotch-yoke drive which yielded a sinusoidal motion, and also required substantial power. Other approaches utilized motors, clutches, and reversing gears.
Previous techniques would require two orders of magnitude more power in order to accomplish this same purpose, even with much lighter weight shuttles. Paradoxically, this increased power increases problems in speed stabilization, motor cogging, mechanism friction, all of which contributes to decreasing the angular stability and constant speed of shuttle motion.